Subtitles of the Movie

To accomplish its editing work, Premiere Pro CS3 uses quite a bit of disk space, referred to as Scratch Disks in the Adobe Premiere documentation. Working in Premiere creates quite a number of these files, so it needs some disk space to work with them. For example, captured audio and video, conformed audio, and preview files are all created when exporting a project. Other files are created to optimize performance or allow real time editing and more. All scratch disk files are saved with the project when the file is saved, preserving them from one work session to the next. If you delete the preview files, conformed audio files, or other files saved to the scratch disk, Premiere will automatically recreate them. The default location for these scratch disk files is the same place the project file is saved. However, you'll want to set up your Scratch Disk Preferences before starting each project. You'll need to allocate more scratch disk space, for example, for those projects that you know will contain longer and more complex sequences. Do this from the Edit, Preferences, Scratch Disks option there at the bottom of that menu. You couldn't quite see it, but it's there at the very bottom of that Preferences menu. This will bring up the Scratch Disks View of the Preferences panel. If your system has multiple disks, you can specify which disks to use in these settings here. Performance can be substantially enhanced by setting your scratch disk to a different disk than the one that Premiere is running from. So for example, if you have two hard drives, C drive, where your programs are stored, and a D drive for your data, you'll want to set your scratch disk to the D drive. If you have multiple data drives, choose as your scratch disk the fastest or largest of those drives. Let me review each of the options here in this dialog. Capture Video is for video files that you create using the File, Capture command. Captured Audio are the audio files that you create using the File, Capture command as well; that will be the audio portion. Video Previews, these are files created when you use the Sequence Render Work Area command, export a movie file, or export to a device. If the previewed area includes effects, the effects are rendered at full quality here in the Preview file. The Audio Previews option here are for files created when you use Sequence Render Work Area command or use the Clip Audio options Render and Replace command, or if you export to a movie file or to a DV device. If the previewed area includes effects, as with the video rendering previews, they will be rendered at full quality in this preview file. The Media Cache is next here. This is for files created by the Media Cache feature, including conformed audio files, PEK audio files, and video index files for MPEG. And lastly, we have the DVD Encoding option here. This is for files created when you export movies to a DVD folder. Notice that for each of these scratch disks, you have an option, Save to My Documents, Same as Project or Custom. You'll want to choose the Custom option if you have additional hard drives. Notice you can also browse for a specific folder on that hard drive. To maximize Premiere Pro performance, use the following guidelines when setting up your Scratch Disk Preferences. First, set up separate disks, if possible, for each type of file. For example, set up one disk for capturing a video, another for audio previews, and so on. Specify your fastest disks for capturing and storing scratch files. Your slower disks can be used for Audio Preview and the project files. Third, specify disks that are actually attached to your computer. Do not use disks located on a network or removable media. Networks are too slow, and most removable drives are even slower, plus, they're not always available for Premiere. And lastly, use physically separate drives instead of multiple partitions on the same drive. Drive partitions still use the same drive mechanism and so do not yield any improvement in performance. And that will conclude this section of the tutorial on setting up your Premiere Pro projects. In this section, you've learned how to use presets to set up your projects, how to create custom projects using the Custom Project settings, how to set up your Auto Saving frequency, how to work with offline files and re-link offline files once those files have been lost or unlinked, and lastly, you've received some tips for improving system performance when working with larger Premiere Pro CS3 projects.